ILMINSTER’S eighth annual literary festival is now in sight and a range of events has been scheduled to celebrate the event.

The festival will take place from May 30 to June 6 and below is a list of some of the scheduled events.

A free programme brochure with the full list of events, details about what’s on, ticket prices, and how to book is available to pick up around Ilminster and Chard from libraries, shops, café, and bookshops.

  • Wes Streeting, Labour Party and Shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, in conversation with Alan Johnson, former politician himself, now turned successful author.
    In two separate events, they’ll be covering how family and education helped Wes escape poverty and transform his life and the challenges Alan faced writing differing styles of books – memoirs, thriller fiction, biographies
  • Peter Rosser, local to South Somerset, talking about his debut book ‘A Sister for Venus’.
  • If you like Sci-Fi, on this occasion based around climate change and to let your imagination run wild, this session is for you.
  • Best-selling author, journalist, and travel writer Felice Hardy, whose grandmother Liesl Herbst fled Austria with her family to escape the Nazis in the 1930s.
  • She went on with her daughter to win the Wimbledon Ladies Doubles Championship, the first mother and daughter pair to do so.

The event will also feature Scotty Mills, who led the Royal Marine Commandos around the world, learned all there is to know about high performance and leadership, and won a national award as the most inspirational serviceman across the entire armed forces.